A Match to the Heart (15 page)

Chest pains and dizziness nagged at me: this was no longer my home and I knew I had to leave. I left Sam in the care of Jennifer, a young veterinary student who had worked for us during the summers, and, not daring to look back, drove away.

I felt like a river moving inside a river: I was moving but something else was rushing over top of me. There was too much to take in: the deep familiarity with a place where I had lived for so long and the detachment a year away brings. The rivers were layers of grief sliding, the love of open spaces being nudged under fallen logs, pressed flat against cutbanks and point bars. I felt as if I'd never left, and at the same time as if I could never come home.

I drove. Chest pains seemed linked to open spaces: the wider the land, the more intense the feeling of constriction. I felt vertigo, the lodgepole pines on the side of the road slanted in on me, and when lightning broke into them I could see they had already burned: this was Yellowstone Park. On mountain passes snow inched away from seams of grass like an eclipse pulling away from the sun. Because I had missed snow, I stood in it barefoot until my feet went numb. My face was a moon, its dark side turned to views I'd looked at for seventeen years, and still I went blind. I tried to move out of myself and go into other things but the taut wires of an aching heart pulled me back in again.

Near the Wind River mountains I stayed with friends who are in their seventies. Every evening after dinner we went for silent walks—no talking allowed—crossing the Green River, hiking up to a pond. In that silence the world began to take on life for me again. Afterward, I slept in a lone log cabin on a high, wide meadow, and at dawn the symphony of sandhill cranes set me upright in bed and I thought, “This is the first time I've been embraced since I was dead.”

When sun burned the sound of birds away, I moved on. Storms came. Where lightning hit the ground I wondered if an X would appear, marking that place as an intersection where all lives crossed or were blown apart, or if it was a moving line running across a tilting, spinning world. Thunder worked like echolocation: it told me where I was, where to go next, and lightning was the lamp that showed the way.

I knew that the traveler must dissolve nostalgic threads of personal history and go ahead with no baggage, no determined route; that the so-called hero is one who has mastered her own dissolution; that she's not a conqueror but a surrenderer, she is “geography's ant.” WaIacitizen of the underworld with a ferryman who had gone mad?

chapter 22

After Wyoming I continued north to Alaska. I had a job teaching on a schooner for a week, then planned to join three biologists and help them count seals. I was tired of people, conversation, noise. Even though I felt lousy, I was well enough to need a change.

The local plane stopped in at Wrangell, Ketchikan, and Petersburg. I read Derek Wolcott's
Omeros,
a St. Lucia version of Homer's
Odyssey:
“You ain't been nowhere,” Seven Seas said, “you have seen nothing no matter how far you have travelled.” As I traveled, the red ember in my back—my exit wound—started to burn.

“Mark you,” the narrator continues, “he does not go, he sends his narrator; he plays tricks with time because there are two journeys in every odyssey, one on worried water, the other crouched and motionless, without noise.”

I was the one on “worried water.” For three weeks I lived on boats wearing yellow and black: foul-weather gear and tall rubber boots. The first boat was a halibut schooner built in 1926 in Tacoma, Washington, with a long deep keel that drew seven and half feet. Her planking was two and a half inches thick by twenty-six feet, clear fir with oak frames, and had been used as a tender on both coasts and for hauling hay in the San Juans.

The first day out, after engine repairs in Petersburg, a lone humpback whale slid between the stern of the boat and the
Umista,
a dinghy whose name means “the return of lost things.” The whale's head was long and flat, her flippers a third of the length of her body, and as she moved by I waited for her singing to vibrate up through the old timbers of the boat.

Everywhere I looked, rivers poured out of island mountains and mist rode the backs of green and clear-cut forests down to long-legged straits. This was a place where bodies of water met bodies of thought, even though I tried not to think about meanings but face directly whatever it was that constituted my life.

I lived in rain and what southeastern Alaskans call “clear weather,” which is drizzle. At least there was no lightning. The tops of hemlocks and Sitka spruces pigtailed into pointed green fortresses, as if tightened by green purse strings. Rocking in and out of squalls, we calculated the time and strength of tides, easing through narrow straits on slack water between tides, eyes glued to the loran and radar each time we lost sight of the mast in mist. I continued reading
Omeros:
“... the ‘I' is the mast; a desk is a raft for one, foaming with paper, and dipping the beak of a pen in its foam.” But I took no notes, nor did I make entries in my journal.

In the evenings the boat spun on its anchor and mist fell to its knees, raining directly into seawater. Trees grew on red buoys, bald eagles lifted out of dark trunks like white-steepled chapels, a raven ate a crab in the boat's crow's nest, and schools of herring, who sometimes migrate in rolled-up balls five or six inches thick, broad-jumped the incoming tide.

Hiking the steep trail of one island, we came on bear shit, purple from berries and still steaming and three tiny ponds at the top of the hill held blossoming water lilies, Alaska cotton, and bog orchids. On seeing these, Jonathan, the captain, said, “It's so beautiful it makes me feel faint,” and we hoped he wouldn't see anything
that
beautiful while at the helm. On the way down the mountain, we ran into the mother bear and her two cubs, and squeezed by her apologetically as she sniffed our air nonchalantly, then thrust her paw into a thicket of bunchberry shrubs.

When we entered Nelson Bay, a seal circled us, but dove when we whistled hello. Two years earlier the schooner had dragged anchor during the night and gone aground. I slept alone on deck in rain, wedged between winches, wrapped in tarps—it was Hitchcockian—tike sleeping in a torn curtain. During the night, Jonathan yelled in his sleep and I listened for metal dragging over rock, though I wasn't sure if it was something I would be able to hear. The anchor held. At dawn Jonathan, Kerry, and I winched in the chain, shortened the lines of the
Umista,
and got under way while the four other passengers slept. The
Crusader
pushed through clouds until there was a clearing: ahead, Baird's glacier was a stepladder of retreating ice that led to daylight.

 
 
From Sitka I flew to Juneau, where I met up with Brendan Kelly, a seal biologist whom I had visited in the Canadian High Arctic the year before, and two National Park Service biologists who were friends of his. We headed “up bay”—Glacier Bay—by skiff for one of the distant glaciers. Out of Bartlett's Cove, whales breached like blossoming flowers and porpoises guided us around a wide bend to the entrance of the bay. In five hours we moved from spruce forest to cottonwoods to ice. Halfway there, cottonwood seeds floated thickly on water, a hint of how the surface would look dotted with ice. Then the water went from blue to green—glacial flour. We were moving backwards in time, through what Brendan called “a textbook scene of succession,” from climax forest to bare, uncolonized soil, and where glaciers had retreated, newly exposed ground “rebounded,” rose up from the compression of heavy ice.

On the way we paddled kayaks. Rafts of ducks three thousand strong parted as we approached, the bones of my paddle catching a shoulder of sun. Held in both hands, the paddle was a sheaf of lightning, dipping, flashing, dipping. I was a poor woman's wounded Zeus—ignoring chest pain and dizziness—my only guide the pointed bow of the kayak.

As we approached, ducks broke into disparate nations, flapping through mist. Bears roamed the beaches of every island, rolling in tall grass, but still I knew I had “been nowhere” and “seen nothing.” I was just gliding...

 
 
Back in the Park Service's fourteen-foot skiff, we continued up bay, then turned west into Johns Hopkins Inlet. As the frequency of icebergs increased, we were forced to slow to an idle, pushing ice floes aside—heavy as despair—with oars. The inlet, half a mile wide, felt narrower because of the scale of the mountains: ahead, Mount Fairweather loomed to
₁₃
,
₀₀₀
feet. On both sides shear cliffs topped by towering peaks shed their snow in avalanches, and charcoal waterfalls tumbled over black ice, scarring white rock. Then we came to where the universe was falling apart.

The glacier looked industrial, 10,000 years of dredged-up dirt swirled into fractured ice and recesses of blue. It calved al most continually in thundering amputations—thunder with no lightning for once—and the shock waves that radiated out from the fallen fragment displaced so much water, the whole inlet undulated.

 
 
We camped on granite ledges near the face of the glacier. In back of us were vertical cliffs leading to the avalanched slopes of Mount Fairweather. Below, thousands of seals hauled out on floating icebergs and dozed on their backs with flippers folded like hands, or lay on their sides with tail flippers curled up, sometimes five to a berg, though some pieces of ice were only large enough to accommodate one seal. Behind them the glacier crumbled, an intricate city whose façade of blue light kept collapsing in.

From my granite perch I looked down bay and saw how the charcoal waterfall had bored four holes through a wide ledge of black ice suspended between two promontories of rock—an elegant Italian fountain of black marble. Is there any beautiful thing we have made that has not appeared first in nature?

While Brendan and Beth started their seal count, I traveled the entire inlet with binoculars. After being on a boat for two weeks it felt as if the granite was lifting and dropping, the way lovemaking in a cabin on the edge of a Big Sur cliff had felt vertical—dropping down to crashing surf, then rising on careening layers of fog.

The bay was littered with ice, and reflections of snow on mountain peaks strobed across water. Sharp reports and sounds like gunfire emanated from shattering ice whose tiniest pieces looked like creatures from the Burgess shale: forms we've never seen before but from whose primeval shapes came the idea for fox, loon, swan, boat, plane, bear, dog, whale, and human. There were no eagles there, just ravens—the ones who brought light to the world, then stole it back.

For a moment I sensed death's presence though I didn't know why. Maybe it had to do with geography: here, at the head of an inlet of dark water was the beginning and end of the world, and I could go no farther, but only face the glacier's moving wall of black dirt and light.

Death is a dark thing but it is also an illumination. Light is the other side of the coin from death, but the same coin nevertheless. When we are close to death or come back from death, we see light and move toward it—whether it has to do with “seeing into” things or staying alive. Ritual death followed by resurrection stands for the death of ego. It is the hero's journey and the teacher's—like Jesus' and the Buddha's—as well as any shaman's or healer's. To become a shaman is to have experienced a strong calling, often marked by a bout with near-insanitv or severe illness first.

Some Eskimos say that compared to shamans, ordinary people are like houses with extinguished lamps: they are dark inside and do not attract the attention of the spirits. Their word
qa
maneq means both “lightning” and “illumination”—because in their culture physical and metaphysical phenomena are considered to be the same.

 
 
 
In the rain at Johns Hopkins Glacier we built a lean-to with oars and tarps and set up our humble kitchen as shock waves from newly calved icebergs broke at our feet. We collected drinking water from a trickling spring that descended through dwarf willows on the slope whose steep wall bound us to our ledge. It was good to be away from the mists and sorrows of the human world, with its big trees and heavy schooners and green nightmares. Here the raw face of the glacier dominated, its deeply crenellated top, black and rough like a city seen from above.

Our large sleeping tent, staked farther up the slope, was shaken by the glacier's detonations and echoing thunder all night. I wrote in my journal by flashlight: “I feel as if I were a fish feeding at the crumbling edge of the universe.” I wanted to wear clothes made from that place—perhaps an auklet feather skirt—and sleep on the white fin of an orca.

One day Brendan and Beth scaled the cliff and disappeared. Just a hike, they said. Leaving me with an aching heart on my slip of granite and no way home. Perfect, I thought. The perfect place to die, not that anyone said I was going to. My calendar reminded me that it was August 6th, the first anniversary of my lightning strike, and also Blaine's birthday. When we discovered this coincidence, he said simply, “As the New Agers would say, we were destined to meet.”

While waiting for Beth and Brendan to reappear, I read a Hudson Bay legend, translated by my friend Howard Norman, about a blind boy and his aunt who was struck by lightning. “I've been lightning-struck and I've become an eater of rotten seal-flippers, fish eyes and bird throats. This is bad luck. Bad luck. Nephew, life has taken a turn for the worse. What's more I'm more thirsty than you can possible imagine.” After she was struck the boy held a vigil beside her. Her hair had turned “stiff as feather quills,” her skin deeply creased, she moaned in pain, and a fever moved about in her body, which only increased her thirst. “A lightning-struck person gets enormously thirsty. You have to keep a close watch because such a person will try to drink the entire sea,” the boy's father warned him.